The tills are alive, with the sound of music!

Could playing the right music in your restaurant help increase your profits?

It’s no secret that music can create and change the atmosphere in a restaurant or bar. Depending on the style and genre of the music, it has the ability to make people feel and act a certain way. It can effortlessly enhance the ambience, the character and the aura of a restaurant, making people happy, relaxed and at ease. Here’s our guide to how altering the music in your restaurant could possibly also alter your income!

Many restaurant owners spend weeks or months carefully designing the interior of their restaurant and the food on the menu to create the right atmosphere, to attract the right customers and to ensure the aesthetic of the restaurant is in keeping with their brand. However, when it comes to music, they often settle for whatever’s popular in the charts. But we’ve recently discovered that the background music in a restaurant can have a huge impact on customer behaviour, and can potentially affect what they’re purchasing, how long they stay and how much they spend.

Having the right music can also affect consumer behaviour when dining in your establishment. For example, when listening to slower paced, classical music, customers have been noticed to increase the average size of their bill by 23%! Whereas when listening to fast paced music, customers become more energetic and eat 30% faster, therefore decreasing the time they spend inside the restaurant and their spend per head, although this could mean having more customers through your door at busy periods so it’s not always a bad thing! One study even found that consumers were inclined to purchase more expensive wines when the music played in a wine store was changed from charts to classical, surprising, right?

But it’s not only the restaurant owners and customers that benefit from the music playing. 74% of restaurant employees said that they enjoy working more when music is playing, meaning that the service they provide will potentially be increased, enhancing customers’ experience inside the restaurant. It’s all making sense now, isn’t it?

We also believe that it’s important to consider what the music your restaurant plays says about your image and what kind of customers it’s going to be attracting- after all, it is an extension of your restaurant’s brand as a whole. The volume, genre and style of music playing inside a restaurant doesn’t only have an affect on customer behaviour, it can actually affect the demographic of customers coming through your door too.According to FastCasual.com, playing the wrong sort of music at your restaurant can reduce overall sales by 4%! Food for thought…?

It’s also important to note that many people dine out to engage in conversation and to catch up with their friends, loved ones or business associates and would prefer not to have to shout over overwhelmingly loud music. So although music is great to create the right atmosphere in a restaurant, try not to offend your customers with the volume you play it at!

You could even try a live music night or share your restaurant’s playlist on your social media to get your customers in the mood before they arrive.

We hope that this article has been music to your ears, and that it helps your business really hit the high notes.Book your free consultation to find out all of the other ways we can help get your business booming!